The Evolution of Blockchain Technology

In This Blog, Dowmap GmbH will explain the evolution of blockchain technology

Many of the technologies we now take for granted were quiet revolutions in their time. Just think about how much smartphones have changed the way we live and work. It used to be that when people were out of the office, they were gone, because a telephone was tied to a place, not to a person. Now we have global nomads building new businesses straight from their phones. And to think: Smartphones have been around for merely a decade.

Blockchain, a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records, called “blocks.” Consider what’s happened in just the past:

*The first major blockchain innovation was bitcoin, a digital currency experiment. The market cap of bitcoin now hovers between $10–$20 billion dollars, and is used by millions of people for payments, including a large and growing remittances market.

* The second innovation was called blockchain, which was essentially the realization that the underlying technology that operated bitcoin could be separated from the currency and used for all kinds of other interorganizational cooperation. Almost every major financial institution in the world is doing blockchain research at the moment, and 15% of banks are expected to be using blockchain in 2017.

* The third innovation was called the “smart contract,” embodied in a second-generation blockchain system called ethereum, which built little computer programs directly into blockchain that allowed financial instruments, like loans or bonds, to be represented, rather than only the cash-like tokens of the bitcoin. The ethereum smart contract platform now has a market cap of around a billion dollars, with hundreds of projects headed toward the market.

*The fourth major innovation, the current cutting edge of blockchain thinking, is called “proof of stake.” Current generation blockchains are secured by “proof of work,” in which the group with the largest total computing power makes the decisions. These groups are called “miners” and operate vast data centers to provide this security, in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. The new systems do away with these data centers, replacing them with complex financial instruments, for a similar or even higher degree of security. Proof-of-stake systems are expected to go live later this year.

Growth in Applications

With ongoing research and greater understanding of how the blockchain works, one of the biggest trends in 2017 is the use of this technology in new application areas across industries. This is happening especially in business segments that have always had a middleman as part of the transaction. This means that many service-oriented businesses decentralize. For example, ride sharing transactions could be handled directly by drivers and passengers using the blockchain, which could then give once-disruptive companies like Uber and Lyft a run for its’ money.

Other applications include streaming services. We could let artists decide how their music is sold and shared, and everyone — from the writer to the producer to the singer — could receive a payment immediately through the blockchain when a song is downloaded, rather than getting their share later on. Rather than waiting for royalty checks to arrive that are processed by a publishing company, the artist can take greater control over their process from publication to payment through blockchain applications.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain

Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology hold great promise for our future. They have the potential to fundamentally change the very fabric of our global society.

Giving billions of people access to a global financial system can do that, let alone the non-financial use cases that are just seeing the light of day. They can bring about greater transparency to industries that today operate without accountability. They can start communicating with things (Internet of Things or IoT) to let the machines do work for us.

If you take away all the noise around cryptocurrencies and reduce it to a simple definition, you find it to be just limited entries in a database no one can change without fulfilling specific conditions. This may seem ordinary, but, believe it or not: this is exactly how you can define a currency.

Take the money on your bank account: What is it more than entries in a database that can only be changed under specific conditions? You can even take physical coins and notes: What are they else than limited entries in a public physical database that can only be changed if you match the condition than you physically own the coins and notes? Money is all about a verified entry in some kind of database of accounts, balances, and transactions.

How miners create coins and confirm transactions

Let‘s have a look at the mechanism ruling the databases of cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin consists of a network of peers. Every peer has a record of the complete history of all transactions and thus of the balance of every account.

A transaction is a file that says, “Bob gives X Bitcoin to Alice“ and is signed by Bob‘s private key. It‘s basic public key cryptography, nothing special at all. After signed, a transaction is broadcasted in the network, sent from one peer to every other peer. This is basic p2p-technology.

Dowmap GmbH is updating itself and its customer’s businesses with updated technologies.